Saturday, March 24, 2007

We wandered down to Ferncourt Primary School to exercise our democratic rights this morning. I love election days. Everyone is so polite, there's that good feeling that change is in the air, and you never know who you might bump into at the polling booth. Today I saw my favourite bus driver and a dear friend's girlfriend.

The liberals didn't even bother with any signs at our polling booth... which is safe ALP and usually has the biggest Greens vote of anywhere.

I was impressed by the Greens' multilingual signs - Greek and Vietnamese at Ferncourt School,

and later in the day I spotted Arabic outside St Francis' in Illawarra Rd. None of the other parties seemed to have bothered with anything other than English.

The parents and citizens association at the primary school was selling flowers.

And they had a sausage sizzle, which I really love the smell of although I'm vegetarian.

I recall last Federal election, my parents - who do not speak very much English - got a pre-recorded telephone message call from Johnnie. All they caught was his name and, very distressed, they telephoned me to ask me to call him (ha ha) to ask what the call was about. Generally, they feel very disenfranchised and we kids have a couple of extra votes (ahem) because we take them to the polling booths and vote for them!

Conversely, I have received letters from ALP all in Vietnamese - which I cannot read!

It had been a while since I saw such queues at Dully high, so I had a sausage for breakfast, bought a few raffle tickets for hampers they were raffling off.

Not too sure about the multi-lingual Green banners though, Greeks, for example, (in terms of a voting majority) are Labor supporters, and I'm only saying that due to being Greek myself (not revealing who I've voted for though lol).

Election periods amaze me, there is so much paper usage, and I reckon 'you go Carmel,' but I'm over all the posters in Dulwich Hill.